Note : This article was adapted from a Hardspell.com report ChampionLLY, and edited by Dr. Adrian Wong.

As most people know, an original Intel retail (boxed) processor not only comes with an original cooler, it also has 3 years of warranty backing it up. Meanwhile, the cheaper bare tray processor is only covered with a 1 year warranty.

The price difference between the retail processor and the tray processor is quite significant. For a Core 2 Quad processor, the price difference is about US$15 (see picture on the right).

Most retail consumers wouldn't mind paying the extra US$15 for a boxed retail processor. After all, it comes with a much longer warranty and a cooler (even if they don't intend to use it). To OEMs and system assemblers though, the extra US$15 in cost makes a big difference. Multiply US$15 by a thousand or a million systems and you get the idea of how much they can save by buying processors by the tray.

To get an even better price from Intel, many OEMs and system assemblers order
tray processors in bulk. They do not make use of all of these processors so
a large number find their way into the DIY markets. That is not the
problem, of course.

Unfortunately, some greedy retailers are also repackaging and selling tray processors as the more expensive boxed retail processors. It has been reported that each set of fake packaging only costs US$0.43 while the cooler costs less than US$1.50. In total, it only costs these people less than US$2 to repackage the processors. This gives them an additional profit margin of US$13 per processor.

Even worse, there seems to be a large supply of extremely cheap Intel Core 2 engineering samples from China. By using these engineering samples instead of genuine OEM processors, these dealers stand to make a much larger profit margin in the region of US$100-200 per processor.

Great for them... but what does this mean to us, the user?

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